1.How did the global recession affect the demand for PR in the USA in 2013?

Our agency, with its focus on B2B technology market, saw an uptick in business in 2013 so the recession was not really a factor. We continued to see strong interest from prospects in the technology market and from existing clients looking to do additional work. Sectors such as big data, analytics and IT security were the fastest growing. The sequestration crisis in the government did cause some of our government IT clients to pause on some projects. PR needs were strong across the board but the strongest need was more integration with our creative services division. More PR clients have an interest in using us as a strategic communications firm where we own all PR services – the content strategy, development and execution. This includes everything from media relations to social media to video to contributed articles to interactive marketing collateral.

2.How was the USA portrait in the media in 2013?

Corporate earnings were strong and our core client base for example saw increased demands for their products and services. The overall business climate was much better in 2013 compared to 2012 but this was not really reflected in the media reports on the US economy.

The media mainly stayed focused on the negatives including the unemployment numbers, housing and Congress’ inability to work together.

Many of our healthcare clients have an eye on the implementation of ObamaCare and the healthcare exchanges. Our technology clients continue to benefit from the increase in attention around IT security, big data and the move to consolidation in IT overall.

3. Which other country stands out as positive or negative example?

China by far was the most covered country when it comes to the media that our clients are most interested in. The coverage of China is fairly mixed here but shades to the negative side more times than not. The big story has been around the alleged hacking of the US Government and other corporations.

There is a lot to say about how things have developed in the past few years in terms of PR but I feel that public relations firms now have a stronger grip on what is happening and understand quite well where the markets are moving. It didn’t really came as a surprise that cybersecurity and Big Data grew so strong and so fast as sub-industries giving the recent climate, but despite this trend many businesses in the majority of sectors still don’t seem to grasp how important it is to stay up to date when it comes to security and making (ethical) use of the data trove generated everywhere.